The Cold War

​The Cold War (1945–1991) was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II, primarily between the USSR, its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and technological competition, e.g. the Space Race.

The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension – the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures against the USSR, which had already suffered severe economic stagnation. Thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, and Russia possessing most of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

During the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet Bloc intelligence organizations kept close watch on a number of activities, in particular, defense readiness of the opposing side. According to U.S. records, at the height of the Cold War, the West carried out more than 3,000 reconnaissance flights annually. About half of these occurred over or near Communist influenced Yugoslavia, Hungary, East Germany, North Korea, Albania and the People’s Republic of China; the others occurred over or near the former Soviet Union. The Department of Defense (DoD) is currently investigating 14 missions from the Cold War era (1946-1991), in which 126 aircrew members were lost and remain unaccounted for. Available evidence suggests that most of these incidents were over-water losses. (DPAA)